historying

When I embarked on a summer research project in 2006, I was lucky enough to have the chance to tag along with an archaeological team each Friday. The team, led by Lucianne Lavin and Marc Banks, was excavating the property of Venture Smith, whom I was researching. There was red tape galore – the site was on the property of a nuclear power plant that was in the process of being decommissioned. But through Lucianne and Marc’s kindness, I got a real taste for the grittier and messier cousin of history: archaeology.

I learned a lot about the discipline. Chief among these realizations was that I was not very good at it. My first day I learned how to dig a 30cm square by 1 meter deep test pit. Dripping with a potent combination of sweat and bug spray, I gamely attempted to dig straight down in even, 10cm increments, pouring the shovelfuls of dirt and stones onto my excavating partner’s sifter so she could look for artifacts. Needless to say our test pit gradually took on a fun-house mirror appearance, especially in comparison to the other, perfectly dug pits around us.

My partner suggested we switch off so she could fix some of my mistakes. I was relieved, until I realized that I had to sift dirt while looking for any kind of material culture. Easier said than done. She carefully showed me the difference between a piece of fire-baked pottery and a normal pebble. I nodded understandingly, confidently lifted up the sifter, and promptly realized I was at an utter loss to tell the difference between a rock and pottery shard. Over the weeks, I got slightly better – to the point where I was throwing out more rocks than pottery, but only just. They finally learned their lesson and ended up having me map out each boulder, tree, and test pit on the small section of property using a tape measure and a series of graphing sheets.

Despite my incompetence, I managed to gain a deep appreciation for both the immense challenges and rewards of archaeological research. There is something truly thrilling to be standing and digging on the very spot where your subject of historical research lived. Although I get the same thrill from a manuscript or document, they lack the tangible reality of a material artifact you excavate in the field. Marc and Lucianne’s analysis led to a series of insights into my research that I never would have gained – they discovered the remnants of a dry dock that implied extensive river trade and activity, a faded cart path that likely corresponded to one mentioned in a land deed, and the foundation of a two-bay house and at least two other structures on the homestead. All of these were exciting and valuable contributions.

On the other hand, I was met with the frustrations of what I saw as broad speculation. Perhaps it was due to the fact that I couldn’t tell the difference between a rock and a nail, but hearing theoretical conjecture about Venture Smith’s life and activities based on tiny bits of pottery raised up red flags for the careful, source-oriented historian in me. I am guessing it is simply another form of source evaluation, one that I am far less comfortable or adept with. Just as I would judge a historical record based on its author, writing style, and context, I’m sure Marc and Lucianne bring to bear an equally careful evaluation of material artifacts.

Finally, I can’t resist linking to an article from the Economist’s Technology Quarterly – titled “Armchair Archaeology.” The article discusses how archaeologists are using satellite imagery such as GoogleEarth to plan expeditions, identify sites, and do surprisingly complex analysis. One cool example is using imagery to identify the quarrying and transportation routes of pre-Hispanic obsidian stone: “Mapping these routes has helped archaeologists reconstruct production and trade patterns, and hence economic, social and political relations in the region…” And the best part? It’s free.

Laurel Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale was published in 1990, and achieved what sports coaches would call a complete victory. Its accolades included a Bancroft and a Pulitzer, along with the AHA’s Joan Kelly and John H. Dunning prizes. Favorable academic reviews were balanced with smashing commercial success, and the book remains a top-selling and widely recognized title.

I finished reading the book last month, and was quite impressed. Ulrich lays out the book into chronological chapters, each of which focus on a particular series of events in the life of Martha Ballard, a midwife who practiced in Hallowell, Maine. After printing several excerpts from the diary on which the book was based at the beginning of each chapter, Ulrich delves into analysis and discussion of the events, their context, and their meaning. Topics range from marital infidelity, the spread of rural debt, evolving (or devolving) medical practices, and the neighbor economy. Ulrich treats each of these subjects with a remarkably incisive and thorough exploration of how oftentimes sparse and measured words in a diary can open up windows into the world of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century New England.

Ulrich writes beautifully, and offers up a plethora of quotable passages ranging from the sage to the touching to the comedic. Included in this is the methodological advice that, “Opening a diary for the first time is like walking into a room full of strangers. The reader is advised to enjoy the company without trying to remember every name.” Meanwhile, when discussing rural debt, Ulrich writes, “Martha’s diary shifts the focus from mortgages and lawyers to wood boxes and sons, showing how family history shaped patterns of imprisonment in an era of political and social transformation…” This is a wonderful quote, and one that succinctly and powerfully makes the argument for the importance of social and family history.

I would argue that Ulrich has had as much of an impact on the field of US social history as any historian in the past twenty years. Social history has been taken seriously within the academy for years, but it has had a slow journey onto the bestseller bookshelves of Barnes and Noble. However, in Ulrich’s case, a great many people recognize the title of her book, which is a monumental achievement for any historical work, and it is made even more remarkable by the fact that it was published 18 years ago. Popular history books are dominated by the subject areas of “great man” biography, military (particularly Civil War and Revolutionary) history, and to a lesser degree politics and economics. To have achieved this level of commercial success with the general public while writing about a relatively obscure eighteenth-century rural woman is a remarkable achievement. Ulrich’s ultimate success was combining the scholarly and commercial potential for a work of social history, demonstrating that the bottom-up perspective can be told with equal degrees of academic thoroughness and popular appeal.

I enjoyed the book on a personal level for a variety of reasons. It dealt with much of the same subject matter as my thesis (social history, rural and neighbor economic patterns, etc.), and she used an empirical methodology that deeply appeals to me. While browsing online, I came across a great interview with Ulrich that spells out how she did much of her research. She took an incredibly disciplined and thorough approach to cataloging almost every aspect of the diary:

I began by counting things. The very thing that had attracted me to the diary in the first place was also the thing that made it difficult to work with. I mean there’s just so much. The diary is a long accumulation of workaday entries. And so I had to find some way to get control of the information so that I could find patterns in it. I hit upon the idea of making up a little form, kind of a data collection form. (And this was in the days before personal computers). And I would go day by day for every other year of the diary, and I would tick off what was in each entry: baking or brewing, spinning or washing, or trading, sewing, mending, deliveries, general medical accounts, going to church, visitors, people coming for meals, etc. Using these sheets, I was able to count the incidence of virtually every activity mentioned in the diary.

When reading this, I couldn’t help but think what Ulrich could have accomplished if she had been conducting her research twenty years later with even a basic grasp of how to use text mining tools. She ended up only cataloging every other year to (understandably) “keep her sanity,” but writing a relatively simple program would have allowed for a far greater and faster analysis of such a huge collection of data. I’m not sure Ulrich could have purposefully given a better plug for the potential and power of digital history.

It is a testament perhaps to the influence and impact of scholars in social and women’s history (such as Ulrich) that I didn’t find the book to be ground-breaking in its subject matter. In the two decades since writing it, women’s history has shifted from a fringe focus to a widely accepted (albeit not fully mainstream) path. The idea of writing about a small-town midwife does not seem like a revolutionary approach within today’s academic landscape. Instead, I read A Midwife’s Tale for what it was: a phenomenally well-researched and well-written work that took an in-depth and refreshing perspective on life in the early American republic.

A recurring theme of the historical field seems to be the perceived schism between popular and academic history. There are a lot of good articles out there discussing the issue, and I would recommend the following in particular:

Adam Hochschild wrote an article titled “Practicing History Without a License” in the March/April edition of Historically Speaking. It is an extremely well-written and creative piece, and the article is accompanied by reactions from a wide variety of historians, including John Demos, Joseph Ellis, and Felipe Fernández-Armesto. As a journalist and outsider to traditional academia, Hochschild really gives a great perspective on some of the problems he sees in this divide. In particular, I loved his idea for one kind of solution: teaming up academic historians with popular writers to produce works that fused exhaustive analysis with beautiful narrative (ex. David Brion Davis and Toni Morisson co-authoring a work on slavery).

David Greenberg wrote “That Barnes and Noble Dream” in a two-part article for Slate back in 2005. Greenberg offers a really great overview of the dichotemy, breaking down various divisions and pointing to both examples and exceptions. He also takes a harder stance against the “Barnes & Noble historian [who] seems to treat history as a pageant of larger-than-life events and people to be marveled at, rather than a set of social, political, and cultural problems to engage.” In order to solve this problem, he suggests striking a more balanced approach to the engagement of historiography – somewhere between the complete obliviousness of popular writers to the work that came before them, and the writing of the academic historian who is completely immersed in arcane, historiographical debate.

Finally, Jeremy Young of the Progressive Historians blog wrote for HNN a piece titled “Why Historians Should Write Books Ordinary People Want to Read.” Young argues forcefully against the validity of academic hand-wringing over the divide, pointing to booming history book sales as a positive trend and instead urging for a re-alignement of how the academy values historical writing: “We should reclaim that aspect of 1950′s academic culture that rewarded scholars, not penalized them, for engaging effectively with the general public through published works.  We should encourage historians to aggressively colonize and then conquer the popular historical market by producing well-researched, well-argued books on popular subjects.” My favorite aspect of Young’s piece is the fact that it garnered over 30 impassioned comments, proving just how relevant an issue this really is.

One of those experiences I find endlessly encouraging and frustrating is to walk through any bookstore and scan the shelves upon shelves of history books. It is incredibly encouraging to be entering a field with that kind of popular sway in the general public. How many people read about physics or finance or literary criticism as a hobby? Far fewer than those who read about history in their spare time. But it’s also endlessly frustrating because the rows of books are dominated by such a select subject area: military history, Revolutionary founding-fathers history, and the biographies of “great men.”

When skimming through a history book, I’ll immediately do the history nerd approach and read the acknowledgments, skim the footnotes, and breeze through the introduction. Doing that gives a decent impression for how the author wrote their book. And I’m continually stunned at the shoddy source evaluation of many popular writers, whose citations take up a sliver of pages and are filled with second-hand secondary source references. On the other hand, I will often read more academic prose, and be stunned at how dense and jargon-filled the prose can be.

What frustrates me, and which many others have highlighted, is that this doesn’t have to be an either-or scenario. There are plenty of exhaustive historical monographs with beautifully-crafted narrative prose. But on the academy side of the fence, the emphasis is almost exclusively on how to “do” history academically, instead of how to write well for a layperson. While I had a number of phenomenal teachers who helped my writing, no one ever had led a single class period devoted to how to write engagingly. The majority of instruction covered how to clearly present an argument, how to support it, how to contextualize it. I would have loved to take a a couple of hours with a creative writing professor and simply learned the basics of writing in a style that makes ordinary people want to read more. Apparently many graduate schools are requiring their students to take a semester-long writing class (I’ve heard rave reviews about Jill Lepore’s “The Art and Craft of Historical Writing” at Harvard), and I couldn’t agree with this more.

Unfortunately, even if history students are instructed and fully capable of writing engaging prose, the stodgy conventions of the academy actively discourage them to take chances, to write something fresh and fun. One solution I was thinking about the other day would be to have history students post weekly excerpts to a blog during the writing stage of their dissertations – it would allow them to take chances, get feedback, and transcend the suffocating traditionalism of writing a historical monograph. Although there is a scary vulnerability to making your draft writing so readily accessible to everyone, I feel that the rewards of openness and collaboration far outweigh the risks.

The entire historical profession needs to take the step of creating a more equitable stick-and-carrot system. Right now, it does a good job of railing against the sloppy history-ing of some popular writers. But for the majority of people out there, poor reviews by snooty academics are rarely read or valued. Consequently, I believe the carrot would be more effective: historians should more actively encourage and rewarde those works that manage to combine serious scholarship with a truly accessible and engaging writing style. Those authors and historians who manage to succeed both academically and among the public at large should be justly recognized as the profession’s most effective ambassadors and leaders.

The Washington Post ran an article on the separate efforts of Dan Alexander Hawkins and Dan Bailey to map historical Washington. In the words of the article’s author, “The two men came to their fascination with Washington’s history by very different paths — pencils vs. pixels — yet sometimes their goals appear nearly identical.” The article is well-written, and offers a real glimpse into the rewards and challenges of historical mapping, whether digital or analog. Also, I really need to get a tour of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center.

Meanwhile, the University of Richmond’s Voting America project has been getting some play in the blogosphere. I have not had the chance to fully play around with it, but Sterling Fluharty at PhDinhistory has reported problems when testing the site for accuracy compared to separately compiled statistics. I’d be interested to see if this issue gets resolved.

Finally, on a non-history note, if anyone likes beautiful infographics and maps, take a look at Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns. Koblin’s graphics of North American air traffic patterns appeared in Wired magazine and are very well-done. Be sure to not only look at the images, but watch the accompanying animations as well (my favorite is the 3-D blobular).

Mozilla Labs recently released the 0.1 version of Ubiquity, a Firefox extension that allows the user to interact with and direct their browser through intuitive, written commands. Ubiquity has met with largely positive and excited reviews from the tech community, from folks at Lifehacker to Hackaday to Tools for Thought. The extension currently allows for a variety of commands. The common example that everyone likes to point to is the “map these” command, where you select text, hit the keystroke to bring up ubiquity and type “map these,” which brings up something like the following:

From there, you can do a variety of things with the map itself, including navigating and moving, or inserting it into a separate page. And of course you can also highlight text, and in Ubiquity type “email this to _____,” which then searches through your Gmail contacts and sends the highlighted text to them. The most common example I’ve read is if you are looking for a restaurant at which to eat with a friend. You can highlight or type in the restaurant name, map it, look for reviews on Yelp, check your calendar for conflicts, and email an invitation to your friend with all of this information included.

Ubiquity interacts with a wide variety of sites through APIs, including Youtube, Weather, Yelp, Twitter, and Flickr. In addition, you can translate and define words, run calculations, export events to your calendar, count words in an article, or convert units. In many ways, it seems to blur the earlier function of Hyperwords (which I covered in a previous post) with the intuitive command line structure of Quicksilver (for Mac users) or Launchy (for Windows).

I immediately thought of interesting commands someone could write for engaging in historical research. Developing a Ubiquity command set for historians would go a long way towards encouraging traditionalists to finally break into digital history. Instead of reading scary words like Python or machine learning, a researcher with little technological background could hit a couple of keystrokes and be off in running with relatively in-depth analysis of digitized archival material. In many ways, Ubiquity could potentially act as a “gateway drug” for digital history. Of course, this all hinges on at least two things:

1) Quality, standardized digitization of source materials combined with quality, standardized open API’s. Dan Cohen has great arguments for the importance of a digitized collection like Google Books not only having an API, but having a good one.

2) Someone in the digital humanities would have to develop these tailored commands for different archives (Bill Turkel, you know you’re interested…) There’s already a Mozilla Labs wiki for creating new commands that looks relatively straightforward, but would probably be above most members of the history community. I’m intrigued by the idea, but unfortunately my own forays into digital history programming have presently taken a backseat to applying to grad schools. Please let me know if anyone in the digital humanities is interested in this…

I feel that Ubiquity takes a substantial next step in the evolution of online interactivity. It’s admittedly buggy (although given its 0.1 version status, this will certainly get better), but it embodies so much of what is positive in today’s digital environment: namely open-source collaboration. Mozilla Labs actively encourages anyone and everyone to develop their own commands and to share them with others. This openness combines with an intuitive simplicity that makes it truly remarkable. As of right now, Ubiquity is a fantastic timesaver and cool trick, but it lacks depth. Almost anything you do in Ubiquity could be done before – just slower and with much less efficiency or ease of use. I have absolutely no doubt that as the open-source developer community jumps on board, this will change.

But for right now what Ubiquity does best is to begin to break down the barriers between computer geeks and laypeople. Some people are writing about the irony of returning to the infant state of the computer interface: the command line.  While interesting, these two instances are fundamentally different: not many people would know how to write even a simple program when faced with earlier command lines, but just about anyone I know can type “Map this” into Ubiquity and get far more complex results. Even as programmers find new ways to write more and more advanced commands, ordinary Firefox users will adopt the basics of Ubiquity in greater and greater numbers. What I foresee in Ubiquity is part of a broader movement that shifts common computing further down the Web 2.0-blazed path of heightened and evolving user participation, control, and access. Instead of having the website developer determine how and where you can go, suddenly you are at the controls of an increasingly powerful and easy-to-use command center for accessing and manipulating data. And I can only dream of the day a grad student will be able highlight some archival text, type “history this” into their command line, and have a fully-compiled dissertation written before their eyes.